Early adopters successfully report under the Common Reporting Standards (CRS) with BearingPoint’s FiTAX

The tax reporting solution FiTAX enables financial institutions worldwide to comply with OECD as well as local requirements on tax-reporting

Amsterdam / Zurich, May 18, 2017 — Management and technology consultancy BearingPoint, which ranks among the leading providers of Risk and Regulatory Technology (RiskTech/RegTech), announced today that the first institutions in early adopter countries successfully submitted their initial reporting under the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) with BearingPoint’s tax reporting solution FiTAX.

The Common Reporting Standard was developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to maximize efficiency and fight tax avoidance. Over 100 countries worldwide have agreed to fulfill these reporting requirements by September 2018. The initial reporting for the first 53 countries, the early adopters, began in the first quarter of 2017. BearingPoint’s FiTAX-CRS module is dedicated to the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEoI) and reporting under CRS. It enables financial institutions around the globe to comply with these new reporting requirements.

Given the complexity of the CRS reporting regime, the FiTAX-CRS module had already been delivered to clients in Q3/Q4 2016 in anticipation that incorrect or late report submissions could result in penalties. By receiving this module well in advance of the filing deadline, FiTAX users had a longer time period to sufficiently work with new processes and use the new module to properly prepare their reports.

We are very proud that the first reports have been successfully submitted and that our clients were able to meet their reporting requirements under CRS and the Automatic Exchange of Information. We are now seeing rising interest in tax reporting solutions from many large financial institutions in the Americas as well as in Asia. Our experiences and lessons learned from the early adopter countries are especially valuable for the Asian-based institutions because many of them are in the second wave countries with first reporting due in 2018. These clients will be benefitting from the operation of FiTAX in European markets.

Ronald Frey, Partner at BearingPoint

BearingPoint’s tax reporting solution FiTAX has proven to be one of the most efficient and flexible solutions in the market. Created in 2001, FiTAX enables financial institutions to automate the regulatory reporting processes and to report for many countries from a single and centralized platform for QI, EUSD, FATCA, UK FATCA and CRS. FiTAX covers more than 85 countries for CRS reporting to local tax authorities, and as part of the continuous improvement of operability, it offers the possibility to directly upload report files to the tax authorities’ portals. A new web-client architecture (SOA ready) was already made available in September 2016. Several large international financial institutions have chosen FiTAX as their global QI, CRS and FATCA reporting software solution, and each year more than 2,500 financial institutions report with FiTAX.

BearingPoint is an independent management and technology consultancy with European roots and a global reach. The company operates in three units: Consulting, Solutions and Ventures. Consulting covers the advisory business; Solutions provides the tools for successful digital transformation, regulatory technology and advanced analytics; Ventures drives the financing and development of start-ups. BearingPoint’s clients include many of the world’s leading companies and organizations. The firm has a global consulting network with more than 10,000 people and supports clients in over 75 countries, engaging with them to achieve measurable and sustainable success.